Streamline Your M&E Production Pipeline

Nothing gets M&E hearts pumping like 4K and 8K
resolution, stereoscopic and 3D content. VR is growing rapidly, which means
more new work for studios, but also rising challenges for M&E IT pros
looking to deliver performance while keeping costs in check. While flash
eliminates I/O issues, it’s too expensive to be widely used for data that
doesn’t really need the performance—and as capacities continue to grow, Tier 1
capacity requirements are straining budgets. In addition to storage I/O,
bandwidth is typically limited to 10GbE per device. This is acceptable when
just a few artists are using data, but creates problems when post-production is
in full swing.

With Siggraph 2017
kicking off in LA July 30th, it’s a great time to examine how
DataSphere helps the M&E industry with software that accelerates application
performance, simplifies management, and reduces storage costs.

Scale-out NAS systems struggle to keep up with bandwidth
demand because they provide an artist or editor’s application with a single
shared mounting point to storage using a 10Gb Ethernet network. When multiple
artists work simultaneously, there is no guarantee that each user’s application
will be mounted to a different share, creating the possibility for contention
for bandwidth. This can slow applications, which interrupts artists’ creative flow
and also slows content production.

Simplify Management with Live Data Mobility

To
support evolving data demands over the course of the project pipeline, IT teams
at some Media and Entertainment companies semi-manually tier data across
different NAS clusters. Unfortunately, the complexity of manually managing data
at large scale increases the rate of errors. The Uptime Institute estimates
that about 70 percent
of data center problems are caused by human error.
No one wants to be the source of those problems at their studio.

DataSphere solves this problem by automatically moving data with
application
storage awareness, analyzing application workloads, priority, historical
trending, and available storage resources, and comparing real-time activity against
business objectives defined by IT and application administrators. DataSphere
then automates data management for NFS, SMB, VMware ESXi clients across
datacenter and cloud based resources, moving data to the most appropriate
resource without application interruption. For example, policies might move less active data and data
that has not been accessed in 10 days to lower-cost NAS, while moving data that
has not been accessed in 30 days to on-premises object or public cloud
storage.

Figure 2 - DataSphere’s intuitive
interface gives clear visibility into where and why data is moving, the data’s
historical activity and why data was moved to maintain objectives.

Reduce Costs
through Efficient Capacity Utilization

As
4K and 8K resolutions, stereoscopic and 3D content, and virtual reality
productions increase the storage capacities studios require, inefficient
capacity utilization is becoming a huge dollar drain. In fact, studios
can expect that about 75 percent of data stored is
typically inactive,
or cold, meaning up to three fourths of a studio’s most expensive storage
capacity is being used inefficiently.

DataSphere can automatically move cold data off Tier 1
storage onto on-premises object or public cloud storage, according to
IT-defined policy. In the event that data is accessed again, DataSphere will
automatically move it back to production resources. Better still, since
DataSphere places all data within a global namespace, it maintains access to
data moved to cloud/object storage as files. This means that applications do
not have to be modified to use retrieved data so the cloud can easily be used
as an active archive. It also means that cloud bandwidth files are minimized,
as DataSphere can retrieve just the files that are needed.

In addition to optimizing the placement of application data,
DataSphere can also automate the movement of backups and snapshots to another
location (including the cloud) for disaster recovery and restoration of deleted
or modified files. This enables studios to take daily snaps of edits and
rendering, and to generate much longer snapshot chains at no additional cost.
When data needs to be recovered or restored from a series of older snapshots,
they can be easily accessed by snapshot management software, while DataSphere
moves the data back to the production environment to complete the recovery
entirely automatically.

Figure
3 -
DataSphere creates a global namespace that connects different types of NAS
storage and the cloud, then automatically places the right data on the right
resource to meet IT-defined objectives.